3 ms·

Another strange comment, this time from an account made 15 hours ago. My entire point was contextual and not in isolation!

bigyabai 2mo ago
There's no conspiracy, I think people just disagree with what "funding" can mean. A bulk sale in the realm of ~20,000 units is equivalent to stakeholder funding when you're at NeXT's scale. It doesn't inherently mean that anything nefarious happened, but there was a B2B contract written up with the feds, and Jobs accepted it. The root comment is a perfectly valid question. Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts, it's a bit weird that they'd single-out NeXT to sell them an off-the-shelf shell. I'm guessing that Steve's number was in a lot of government Rolodexes after Michael Dell and the others.
- seizethecheese 2mo ago
  Sure, and that would be a reasonable thing to reply to the main comment here, but the actual comment was just muddying the waters and a total non sequitur, as written.
  - orliesaurus 2mo ago
    ai bots on hn? naaaaa.....
- deleted 2mo ago
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- deleted 2mo ago
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- kjs3 2mo ago
  Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.
  - detourdog 2mo ago
    I had a boss at a WebObjects shop who maxed out an old Cube with Cube motherboards and did some sort of magic something or other to make a multi-processor. http://www.polylith.com/Tech/NeXT/backplane_hack.html http://www.polylith.com/Tech/NeXT/backplane_hack.html
    - kjs3 2mo ago
      That's pretty clever, but not surprising. NuBus was designed as a multimaster bus, so it should work (famous last words). The fact that your boss said YOLO and tried, that it actually did work, and the boot code helped out, is very cool.
      - detourdog 2mo ago
        The partners at that firm were fearless and this particular partner had started at NeXT as CMU student support. They also literally ended up with a truck full of NeXT systems in the late 1990's. I directly reported to a guy that was still using his NeXT slab from his student days. Second best place I ever worked.

bigyabai 2mo ago

There's no conspiracy, I think people just disagree with what "funding" can mean. A bulk sale in the realm of ~20,000 units is equivalent to stakeholder funding when you're at NeXT's scale. It doesn't inherently mean that anything nefarious happened, but there was a B2B contract written up with the feds, and Jobs accepted it. The root comment is a perfectly valid question. Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts, it's a bit weird that they'd single-out NeXT to sell them an off-the-shelf shell. I'm guessing that Steve's number was in a lot of government Rolodexes after Michael Dell and the others.

seizethecheese 2mo ago
Sure, and that would be a reasonable thing to reply to the main comment here, but the actual comment was just muddying the waters and a total non sequitur, as written.
- orliesaurus 2mo ago
  ai bots on hn? naaaaa.....
deleted 2mo ago
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deleted 2mo ago
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kjs3 2mo ago
Since the government wanted to replace the guts with custom Motorola/Intel parts Or they wanted to plug a couple of NuBus coprocessor boards in.
- detourdog 2mo ago
  I had a boss at a WebObjects shop who maxed out an old Cube with Cube motherboards and did some sort of magic something or other to make a multi-processor. http://www.polylith.com/Tech/NeXT/backplane_hack.html http://www.polylith.com/Tech/NeXT/backplane_hack.html
  - kjs3 2mo ago
    That's pretty clever, but not surprising. NuBus was designed as a multimaster bus, so it should work (famous last words). The fact that your boss said YOLO and tried, that it actually did work, and the boot code helped out, is very cool.
    - detourdog 2mo ago
      The partners at that firm were fearless and this particular partner had started at NeXT as CMU student support. They also literally ended up with a truck full of NeXT systems in the late 1990's. I directly reported to a guy that was still using his NeXT slab from his student days. Second best place I ever worked.